Let’s not mock gaps in folk’s knowledge but encourage more learning instead

When author Randall Munroe asked for questions from the floor following a recent talk, the response was unusual. He was set a series of outrageous problems by the audience. What would happen if the universe was full of soup? Why don’t we dispose of the world’s rubbish by firing it at the sun?

The physicist and cartoonist has forged a career and published a series of successful books by applying science to unlikely scenarios.

One of my favourite questions from his most recent What If? book is whether all the world’s bananas would fit in all the world’s churches. (The answer is no, unless there was a person in one of those churches constantly eating a lot of bananas.)

His audience is weighted towards teenage boys bent on destruction by volcano, train crash or unlikely interplanetary event.

The main thing I learned from hearing him is there’s more to Munroe than that. He could, presumably, carry on raking in cash ad infinitum by modelling his nerd army’s apocalyptic fantasies. But he went out of his way to make a different point before the show closed.

He explained that, if someone tells you a fact you already know or assumed was common knowledge, then welcome it and have a conversation – don’t mock ignorance, but celebrate learning.

Munroe wants to change thinking, improve engagement and take people with him. He’s even applied maths and worked out that, on average, 10,000 people a day learn something “everyone knows” by adulthood.

While he draws everything back to science, I, inevitably, see all through a political prism.

This weekend, there was talk of the government pursuing a Brexit settlement that would give the UK access to the single market without signing up to freedom of movement. That’s not how the EU or the single market works. You can’t have one without the other.

But in this era of divisive politics, we can go on social media to despair and mock those yet to learn this apparently fundamental fact. Or we can celebrate that as the proposal hits the buffers, more people are having their understanding of EU and foreign policy expanded.

If you make fun of people who admit gaps in their knowledge, you train them to keep it to themselves next time.

The soup universe and the bananascoffing pastor may catch the eye but, as so often with scientists, the wisdom of Randall Munroe runs deeper and he has lessons for everyone.